


Of Phantoms and Second Chances

by weareallmadeofstardust



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Child death (mentioned), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Light Angst, mentioned batfam but none of them actually appear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 08:10:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17956844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weareallmadeofstardust/pseuds/weareallmadeofstardust
Summary: Jason Todd came back wrong.





	Of Phantoms and Second Chances

Jason Todd came back wrong.

It wasn’t just the flare of green in his eyes, the Pit water that ran through his veins. It wasn’t just the rage that thrummed uncontrolled beneath his skin. No, it was something much more.

At first, he dismissed them as hallucinations. Just another side effect, a twisted vision edged in green, but nothing real, surely. He was wrong.

They were easy to miss at first glance. Their forms shimmered under the sun, like mist that hasn’t quite dissipated, hazy and indistinct but still clear. If he saw them walking past on the street, Jason probably wouldn’t have taken a second glance. It was Gotham, after all. Seeing someone whose feet didn’t seem to connect with the ground was hardly the strangest thing in the city.

He realized what they were eventually, but he did his best to ignore them. For someone like him- someone whose footsteps traced a path of death wherever he went- seeing ghosts couldn’t possibly be a good thing.

He considered, at first, that he might be followed by the people he killed. And he does see them, as disgusting as when they lived, whispering threats into his ears, snarling like rabid dogs as they passed by. Jason learned early on to ignore them; now, they were nothing but smoke and memories, an imprint left by someone too vile to live.

The Red Hood was followed by his victims, yes. But they weren’t the ones that made it hard to sleep at night. The ones that did that were the ones like Alicia Lee.

Alicia was ten when she died. She and her sister, Molly, were kidnapped by a small-time thug named Tommy Harris, along with a half-dozen other girls between six and fifteen. Before, the man hadn’t even been on Jason’s radar. Now, he was desperate, and that made him dangerous.

Jason had found and rescued the children, but not before Harris had panicked. He was sloppy and scared and trying to operate under the radar, beneath the notice of the Bats and the Hood. Apparently, he hadn’t heard the cardinal rule. No one hurts kids.

Alicia died choking on her own blood, thin fingers clutching at Jason’s jacket. She died and Tommy Harris received a bullet to the head for it, but there was nothing that could change the fact that a little girl was dead on the Red Hood’s watch. Not for her sister, and not for Jason.

She was the first to follow him. The others usually stayed for around a day, often less, before disappearing to who knows where, but Alicia traced his footsteps for two weeks, hovering just on the edge of his field of view. Everywhere he looked, she was waiting, calm brown eyes fixed on him.

Eventually, he gave up on her just going away and learned to live with her presence the way that he learned to live with the others: with willful ignorance. And if his nightmares of coffins and crowbars and burning pain were interspersed with a little girl, throat cut, well, no one had to know.

No one except Alicia, apparently. Because for some reason, she had come into his safe house. And was sitting at the end of his bed.

Jason had a gun out and pointed at her before he knew he had moved, breath coming quicker than it should but hands steady. His vision was edged with green, he noted dispassionately, and his mouth tasted like smoke and blood.

“What,” he snarled after a moment, “do you want from me?”

“So you can see me,” Alicia said sagely, nodding her head. “I thought so, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Yeah, I can see you,” he spat. “Why have you been following me?”

Her brow furrowed slightly. “Good question.”

“If you’re looking to be avenged, I did that.”

Her eyes widened in almost comic surprise. “Avenged? No. But thank you.”

There was a sour taste in Jason’s mouth as he set down his gun and dragged one hand through his hair. “Why are you still here, kid? Why didn’t you go… I don’t know. Wherever the others go.”

She sat on the end of his bed, her form making no impression on the covers, and pulled her knees up to her chest. “I don’t want to.”

“Why not?” Jason asked, forcing his voice to remain steady and not angry, pushing back the green to nothing more than a faint film. This was a kid, he reminded himself. A dead kid, but a kid all the same.

“I’m scared.”

Jason sighed, something like guilt pooling in his stomach. “I can’t really help you there.”

“I know,” she said, nodding. “I know you can’t.”

Both of them fell silent for a moment, the only sound coming from the window, the light of sometimes-unreliable streetlamps only partially blocked by the curtains. Alicia, he noticed, didn’t cast a shadow.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally.

“Why?”

“What?” Jason asked. Alicia looked up to meet his gaze.

“Why are you sorry? You didn’t kill me. You saved the others. You stopped the man who hurt me.”

“But I didn’t save you,” he said flatly. “You are- were- ten. You should have lived longer than ten. I didn’t move fast enough, so your death is on me, whether it was by my hand or not.”

But Alicia was already shaking her head. “You did all that you could. How could I fault you for that?”

“It wasn’t enough,” Jason muttered. “I could slaughter every thug in this city and it still wouldn’t be enough. Gotham would just make more.”

“You saved my sister, Hood,” Alicia said softly. “I can’t ask for more than that.”

Jason sighed, but he didn’t say anything. The silence stretched out again.

“Will you stay with me?” she asked, voice small. “Just for a little while. Then I’ll move on.”

“Of course I will.”

Alicia smiled at him, even through the tears that were starting to collect on her lashes, and moved to sit leaning against the headboard next to him. It was quiet, but it was peaceful, too. Some ghosts, Jason reflected, didn’t make half-bad company.

Finally, when the sunrise was just creeping through the window, Alicia stood. She drifted over to the window, the light distorting her form, and offered him one last bright smile. “Thank you, Hood.” Then she stepped into the wall and disappeared.

Jason sighed to himself, watching her go. No matter what she said, she was so young. He should have been able to do more.

But somewhere in this city, a girl named Molly Lee would be waking up soon. She would go to school, probably. Grow up. She’d live. And even if Jason couldn’t save everyone- even if one day down the line, he failed to save her- at least he’d given her that.

* * *

Jason had only agreed to come back… not home, but to the Manor, because he knew Bruce would be off-world. Which made it rather surprising when he saw him in the doorway.

He saw him out of the corner of his eye at first, just a blur of tall and dark hair and suit, and immediately tensed, his vision misting over acid-green. Because Bruce was supposed to be with the Justice League, not here, not now.

He turned. For a moment, he didn’t even recognize the man in front of him, but it wasn’t Bruce. The man in the doorway looked mostly similar, with only small differences- his hair was a couple of shades lighter, his eyes brown instead of blue- but what struck Jason most was that he looked… young, and happy. No older than thirty-five, eyes crinkled with laughter at the corners.

Then the woman joined him, smiling at Jason softly, pearls glinting in the light, and it clicked. “Thomas and Martha Wayne.”

They beamed at him. “Jason.”

“What are you doing here?” It didn’t make sense, them being here. Ghosts didn’t hang around for decades. The dead weren’t meant to mingle with the living.

Except for him, he supposed. Jason Todd, always the exception.

“The Manor has always had a guardian,” Thomas explained. “The most recent of the Wayne line to pass. We watch over the house and its inhabitants until our time comes.”

“You’ve been here the whole time?” Jason asked. “Watching Bruce grow up?” He spat the name like a curse, tasting blood and smoke in the word.

Martha nodded, eyes soft as she watched him. “And you. And the rest of our grandchildren.”

“I’m not your grandson,” he muttered, turning away. He should just head to the library, that was what he had been meaning to do. Not talk to the dead that should have moved on.

Thomas’ voice stopped him. “Maybe not. But you were once.”

He pivoted to face them, the green haze thickening. “Well, it didn’t mean much, did it?” He should never have come here. He should have known that this place would just drag up all of the past that he’d put to rest. This house might as well have been a mausoleum to him, thick with shadows of his past.

“It did.”

“Yeah, right.” Jason snorted. “That’s why he put ‘a good soldier’ on that goddamn case. Really shows you love your son, right?”

Martha’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Jason.”

“No. You don’t get to scold me. You are not my grandparents no matter what you think.” Jason took a steadying breath, fighting to keep the Pit in check. The green haze whispered softly in his ears, as ceaseless as the ghosts he just couldn’t get away from.

He opened his eyes to see Martha standing just in front of him, head tilted back to meet his gaze. She didn’t flinch at the poisonous green he knew was spilling from his eyes, simply looked at him, steadfast and calm.

“Maybe you aren’t,” she admitted. “Maybe you aren’t our grandson, even if you were. But that doesn’t change the fact that we love you.”

Jason swallowed back all the biting retorts he could have said and took a deep breath. “Am I supposed to care?”

Thomas moved forwards to stand next to his wife, and Jason noticed with slight surprise that he was taller than the other man. “You don’t have to. Just remember it.”

Jason looked at them again, _really_ looked. They were young, he realized. He always thought of their ages in comparison to Bruce, but…

“How old were you?” he asked. “When you died.”

Martha’s blue eyes went sad, and she linked her fingers with her husband’s. “Thirty.”

Closer to Dick’s age now than Bruce’s.

“It’s good to see you, son,” Thomas said, derailing his train of thought. Jason’s jaw clenched.

“I’m not your family,” he snapped. “I stopped being part of this family a long time ago.”

Thomas just smiled, and something inside Jason- some tightly-wound piece of self control- snapped.

“Did they tell you what I’ve done?” he hissed. “The people I’ve hurt. The deaths I’ve caused. I came to Gotham intending to blow up your precious son. These bridges are burned to the ground. There’s no fixing that.”

But they just looked at him with those stupidly calm expressions, and he felt something like green fire boiling in his veins, crackling and ferocious and destructive. He wanted to hate them. He wanted to hurt them.

“I believe that there’s nothing beyond fixing,” Thomas said calmly. “Not Gotham, not this family, and not you.”

Jason growled deep in his throat. “Idealism fixes nothing. Sentiment fixes nothing. The only thing that fixes something is a bullet to the head of people who deserve it.”

The anger surging beneath his skin felt like a force of nature, fogging his vision and making his heartbeat echo in his ears. Unconsciously, his hands curled into fists, nails digging into his palms, and the air tasted like metal, like the blood-dust-fire-fear of the warehouse. The Lazarus rage felt like the crowbar slamming against his skin and the feeling of coming back, his lungs tightening and the sensation of wrong, wrong, _wrong._ If Thomas Wayne had been corporeal, he would have attacked him. As it was, he settled for tensing in preparation for a fight that wasn’t coming.

Sometimes he really, really hated ghosts.

“Jason,” Martha murmured softly, calmingly. It sounded like Talia, back in the early days, back when he was sure she cared. He took a deep breath.

“I didn’t come here to listen to this,” he said finally. “I shouldn’t have come in the first place.”

Martha smoothed one translucent hand across his hair, leaving a sensation somewhere between a light mist and ice water. “You don’t always have to fight, Jason. Is it such a terrible thing? To be loved?”

“Fighting is what keeps me alive,” he said, voice going Crime Alley-rough. “Always has. And they don’t love me. They love the kid they lost. He’s still dead, and someone else took his place.”

He turned away. “I’m leaving. This was a waste of time.”

His skin itched with the feeling of their eyes on him, the longing to just _get out._ Every step saw him nearly overwhelmed with memories, but he kept his head down as he left the house, the echo of a child’s laughter chasing him out.

Sometimes, he reflected, the worst ghosts were the ones he couldn’t see.

* * *

He didn’t even know why he bothered to visit. If there was nothing left for him in the Manor, then there _definitely_ wasn’t anything left for him here. Somehow, he ended up standing in front of the gates anyway.

Jason decided that gates were overrated and elected to slip through the gap in the security he’d found when he was thirteen and didn’t want anyone to find him. Sure enough, he landed on the well-kept grass softly, the security silent.

_Really, B, you never fixed that?_

The headstones sat in neat rows in front of him, dozens of Waynes from ages past reduced to names and dates and granite. He averted his gaze from Thomas and Martha’s monument and walked instead towards one of the smaller, secluded graves.

He paused on his way there. There was someone standing in front of a small, lonely grave. A ghost, he realized after a moment.

Wait. That was _his_ grave.

Jason had to choke back nausea as he remembered the feeling of fingernails scrabbling and tearing against the inside of his coffin, the sensation of dirt filling his nose and mouth. He took two quiet, deep breaths, and carefully averted his gaze from the headstone and plot of earth. That wasn’t important right now. What was important was that there was a ghost standing in front of his grave.

The woman must have heard him, because she turned, and her eyes went wide at the same time as Jason’s vision went acid green. No. It couldn’t be her. She didn’t have any unfinished business to keep her around.

But it was. Why couldn’t anything ever be simple?

“Jason?” Sheila Haywood asked. “I- Jason?”

His voice was rough as gravel as he demanded, “What the _hell_ are you doing here?”

She just stared at him for a moment, like she had been waiting an eternity for this. Like he was some kind of miracle.

“I asked you a question. Don’t make me repeat it.”

“I… visit, occasionally,” she said, still seeming to be in a daze. “Is it really you? How?”

“Meddling,” Jason said. “Why would you visit my grave? Didn’t seem like you cared that much when you sold me out to the man who killed us both.”

Sheila flinched like she’d been struck. “I regret it.”

“Is that supposed to make me forgive you?”

“No,” she said, eyes falling to look at the ground. “No, it’s not. I wouldn’t forgive me either.”

Jason’s lips pressed into a thin line. She continued, words spilling out of her like a dam bursting. “I was selfish. I was cruel. I was shortsighted. I made my choice when I was thinking only of myself and I’ve regretted it ever since.”

Jason watched her flatly. She was shaking, hands fisted in her pockets, and when her gaze flickered up to meet his, she looked… sad. As if this had been weighing on her ever since Ethiopia.

That didn’t change that when he looked at her, his skin shuddered with the memory of phantom blows and the Pit rage, kept on such a short leash, demanded to _destroy._

“You got me killed,” he said. “You sold me out to a madman, knowing that it would cost me my life. Your own son. All of that to protect your own interests.”

She said nothing, just watched him silently.

“And you think _regret_ changes anything?” His breath was quickening, far too shaky for his liking, mind filled with explosions and screaming and pain.

He turned away. He couldn’t keep looking at her, at that grave that someone had oh-so-carefully repaired after he’d torn it apart from the inside out. Someone trying to pretend that Jason Todd was still dead.

“You aren’t my mother,” he said, not looking at her. “My mother is Catherine Todd. You aren’t.”

“I know.”

Jason took a deep breath. “I can’t forgive you. I don’t want you near me. But I am sorry that you died.”

“Do you regret it?”

She moved to stand in front of him, hazy and indistinct in the shadow, like a dream made real. “Do you regret trying to save me?”

Jason’s mouth tasted like ash. “The kid who died wouldn’t. I think someone else came back.”

“I didn’t ask about Robin. I asked about you.”

Jason’s hands curled into fists. “Leave, Sheila.”

Something like hurt passed across her face before it turned to resignation, and she nodded. “It’s time for me to go on.”

Jason watched in silence as she seemed to dissolve, falling apart into curls of mist that blew away on the wind. Then he sighed, turning back towards the gates.

“I need a smoke,” he muttered, raking one hand through his hair. The green was fading, but restlessness still buzzed in his veins, ruining any hope he’d had for a quiet night. He needed to drive, to fight, to run, to do anything to chase away the shadows of maniacal laughter and fear and betrayal and _let’s see, forehand or backhand?_. Coming to the cemetery had been a mistake. The ghosts weren’t a _gift._ Seeing the dead was a curse placed on someone who was broken. It was a punishment for coming back when he was never meant to. A punishment for disturbing the living.

He ignored the crawling feeling tracing its way up his spine and turned towards the gates, leaving his grave and its epitaph behind. 

_Jason Peter Todd. Beloved son._

Maybe ‘a good soldier’ was more accurate.

* * *

The next time that Jason visited the cemetery, he didn’t bother dodging the security. He walked right in, boots squishing in the grass from the rain the night before, and turned towards the more recent graves.

The air smelled like rain and mud and stone, paralyzingly familiar, almost making him stop in his tracks.

_Fists pounding on wood and silk, screams tearing his throat, the wood and dirt tearing his fingertips, mud filling his mouth and nose-_

He gritted his teeth. That wasn’t what he was here for. He was here so he could stop being chased by his past, not to drag up memories best left buried.

He skirted his own grave and stopped at the headstone next to it, stuffing his hands in his pockets. He hadn’t expected her to be here, of course. She was probably long gone by now, off to… wherever the dead went after they chose to move on. Still, it was hard not to be disappointed, standing in the cemetery alone.

“Hey, mom.”

Silence answered him.

He didn’t bother saying anything else, just stared at the headstone. The wind picked up, cold and brisk, and Jason shivered.

From somewhere behind him, there was a soft gasp, but he ignored it. There wasn’t a living creature that could get past the security, and if the intruder was dead, well, the dead couldn’t touch him.

“Jason?”

He stiffened. The woman’s voice sounded familiar, but it couldn’t be…

“Jason,” she breathed, voice thick with relief. “I- it’s really you, isn’t it?”

The ghost drifted into his line of vision, eyes wide with shock and hands half outstretched towards him, and his breath caught in his throat.

“Mom?” he asked, almost too soft to be heard over the wind.

Catherine Todd’s ghost was standing in front of him, smile as bright and eyes as clear as when she lived. Before the drugs and the exhaustion and the loneliness.

“Jay,” she said, lips parted in surprise. “You… you’re alive? And you can see me?”

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “Yeah, I can. Side effect of sorts.”

Catherine- Mom- looked… shaken, more so than any ghost he’s encountered before, her hands still outstretched towards him. She didn’t seem inclined to fill the silence, so Jason was the one to break it.

“What are you doing here? It’s been…” _years, a lifetime, forever-_ “-ages.”

She blinked, seemingly shaken out of some kind of daze, and smiled at him. “I suppose I just… couldn’t bear to let you go.”

Jason didn’t really know what to say to that. Eventually he settled for, “Were you watching the whole time?”

Catherine shook her head. “Only off and on until Ethiopia. The rest of the time I just… drifted.”

Jason’s throat felt tight with the force of all the words he wanted to say to her. His voice didn’t seem to want to work.

“I am so sorry,” she murmured. “I never meant to leave you alone.”

“Well it doesn’t much matter what you _meant_ to do, does it?”

Catherine looked up at him at that, but she didn’t seem surprised. Instead, she just looked sad.

“You left,” he said, breathing ragged. “You started using and then you went too far and you were gone. You left me alone long before you died.”

She shook her head, not denial, more like resignation. “Nothing I can say will make up for the past.”

She smiled at him, small and sad, dark hair untouched by the wind even as the grass swirled around their feet, eyes drinking him in like she could never get enough. As if this was everything she had ever wanted.

“You’ve grown into such a wonderful young man,” she said, voice warm.

There was a moment of silence as they just took each other in, the wind swirling between them.

“Are you… okay with everything I’ve done?” Jason asked suddenly. “As the Red Hood.”

“Are you?”

Jason blinked, then considered it. “I guess… I wasn’t a good person, at the beginning. I think I still might not be. But I did some good where Batman couldn’t.”

“Then that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?” she asked. “You shouldn’t live your life for me, Jay. You shouldn’t live your life for anyone but yourself.”

“I… yeah. Thank you.” He blinked back the sudden prickling in his eyes.

“I am so glad you’re alive,” she whispered, stepping so close that if she were corporeal, Jason’s breath would have ruffled her hair.

“No one’s said that to me,” he admitted.

She reached up to cup his cheek with one hazy hand, leaving it tingling. “I am so incredibly glad that you got a second chance, Jay. And I’m proud of you, always.”

“I wish we’d had more time,” he murmured, quiet but not blown away by the wind.

Catherine’s face was soft and open and so, so affectionate as she gazed up at him, small smile curving her lips. “Life is what it is,” she said to him. “All we can do is keep going.”

The words made him flash back to being nine years old, sitting out on the fire escape sharing a cigarette with her to keep the hunger pangs at bay. He’d been angry- about what, he didn’t remember- but Catherine had whispered to him, _Just keep going, Jay._

“You have a family,” she continued, eyes dropping towards the space between them. “They aren’t perfect, yes. But they do care about you.”

Jason’s mouth felt dry as he said, “This is just temporary, you know it is. As soon as I mess up, I’ll be gone again. Sent away to my half of the city or tossed in Arkham with all of the criminals they claim to hate so much.”

“Maybe,” she murmured. “But maybe they won’t. Isn’t it worth it, to take that chance?”

“Not when taking chances has done nothing but hurt,” he said flatly. “They love the boy who went into a grave years ago. Not the person who came out.”

“They can learn to love you,” she told him, lifting one hand to hover above his chest, as if she could feel the beating heart there. “You can learn to trust them. They are a better family than I could have ever given you, Jason.”

“You were good,” he said through the tightness in his throat. “You were all I ever wanted.”

Catherine’s smile widened, eyes brimming with tears that glittered like stars. “I was happiest with you in my arms. But that has to be over now. It’s time for me to go on.”

“I know.”

Her feet drifted up off the ground, and she leaned forwards to brush a kiss like ice to his forehead. “Goodbye, darling. I love you so, so much.”

He closed his eyes, swallowing back the lump in his throat. When he opened them, she was gone.

The graveyard was as silent as before, Catherine Todd’s headstone sitting in the grass, flower buds just starting to grow around its base. Jason offered it a half-smile, oddly peaceful despite the grief.

“Thanks,” he said.

Then he turned and walked back towards the gate, damp grass squishing under his boots.

Maybe Jason Todd came back wrong, with his Pit-green eyes and the rage that raced like fire through his veins, but maybe… maybe he didn’t. Maybe this was nothing more or less than a second chance.

The gate swung shut behind him, cemetery as empty and silent as before.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't have a very firm grasp of Sheila and Catherine's personalities, so they might be out of character.
> 
> Comments welcomed and appreciated!


End file.
